TL;DR: Instead of asking ChatGPT if you can afford a house, this prompt runs your numbers through job loss, a $50k repair, a rate reset and a forced sale, then gives you one of four verdicts.
Why the usual question fails
Ask an AI “can I afford this house?” and you usually get a mortgage calculator with a pep talk. It tells you whether you qualify. It does not tell you what happens when life gets messy.
This prompt, shared by u/realFinerd on r/ChatGPTPromptGenius, takes a different route. It stops asking about affordability in general and forces the model to work through specific bad scenarios, one at a time, with your real numbers.
What you feed it
You fill in the blanks with the basics:
- Income, monthly living expenses and debts
- Cash, brokerage investments and retirement accounts
- House details: price, down payment, rate, loan term, taxes, insurance, HOA, mortgage insurance, utilities
- Planned repairs, furniture and moving costs right after purchase
Anything you don’t know can be marked “estimate it”. Turn on web search if your model has it, so it pulls current local rates, taxes and insurance figures.
What it calculates
First, the baseline. It works out how much cash you have left right after the down payment, closing, moving and planned work. Then it builds your real monthly cost of ownership, including a maintenance reserve, and shows what’s left each month after debts and living expenses.
Then come the stress tests:
- Income shock: one income disappears for 6 months, then 12 months
- Major repair: a $15k, $30k or $50k surprise in year one
- Housing-cost shock: taxes, insurance and HOA all jump 25%
- Rate shock: the payment if your rate resets 2 and 3 points higher
- Forced sale after 3 years: home worth what you paid, 10% less, and 20% less, with selling costs and prepayment penalties included
- Combined bad year: 9 months without one income, a $25k repair and a 15% price drop
For each one, it reports monthly cost, cash flow, savings remaining, months until your liquid assets run out, whether you’d touch retirement money, your equity, and whether you could keep the house without new debt.
The four-tier verdict
The part I like most is the ending. The prompt makes the model pick one label:
- Comfortable: you absorb the shocks without touching retirement or taking on debt
- Tight: fine day to day, but one big shock drains your savings
- Fragile: you only keep the house if everything stays close to plan
- Not financially resilient: a realistic shock would force debt, retirement withdrawals or a sale
It also names the scenario that breaks you first and tells you how much extra cash, how much lower a price, or how much more monthly surplus would move you up one tier. That last bit turns a scary result into a to-do list.
Where it can go wrong
The author makes a fair point: monthly spending is the hardest number to fill in honestly. Guess low and every scenario looks rosier than reality. Pull a few months of actual card and bank statements before you run it.
Also remember this is a planning aid, not financial advice. Check the model’s math, especially the tax and insurance estimates, before you make a decision.
Use cases
- Comparing two houses at different price points with the same stress tests
- Deciding how big a down payment you can make without leaving yourself exposed
- Checking whether an adjustable-rate mortgage is a gamble you can survive
- Testing a dual-income purchase for what happens if one job goes away
Prompt of the Day
Here is the opening of the prompt so you can see the framing. Grab the full version from the original post.
I’m considering buying a home and want to know whether I can actually afford it if things don’t go according to plan. Don’t just tell me whether I qualify for the mortgage. Stress-test the purchase and tell me how much financial margin I would have after buying. Use current mortgage, property tax, insurance, and other relevant figures for my location where needed. Show everything in today’s dollars.
After that, you add your filing status, location, income, expenses, assets, debts and house details, then list the scenarios and the four-tier classification.
Your move
Run it with your real numbers and see which tier you land in and which scenario hits first. If you tweak the prompt and get a sharper result, share the change with the community so others can borrow it. Fair winds on the house hunt, Captain YAR
Copy-paste prompt that stress-tests a house purchase: job loss, $50k repair, rate reset, forced sale, and a 4-tier verdict
by u/realFinerd in ChatGPTPromptGenius